Breeder Inquiry! re: parent involvement in egg species

[these_balls]

VOTING IS NOW CLOSED. THANK YOU FOR PARTICIPATING.

Good day, citizens of PokéLand!! (I'm still trying to invent a cutesy word for y'all)

We've got a bit of a breeding inquiry for you guys regarding the species of a pokémon based on the mother and father of crossbreeding. There had apparently been an 'official' decision that had been in play that differed from the changes stated in the F.A.Q., so we've decided to retract the rule in order to let you guys decide.


How much should the parents' species to influence the eggs' species in a breeding?'

    Option One: As per nintendo game mechanics, the eggs are 100% the mother's species.

    Option Two: The eggs are rarely the father's species, mostly the mother's (5% for father's species)

    Option Three: The eggs are uncommonly the father's species (25% for father's species)

    Option Four: The eggs have an even chance of becoming the mother's or father's species (50/50)


As usual, please leave answers, additional questions, and extra input in the comments!


Additionally, there's a Anti-Rocket Group forming, and an upcoming Valentine's day masquerade, if your characters are interested!

Comments

[usedlaserbeam]

I would vote for Option One, and will wholeheartedly admit my flagrant personal bias for why as follows:

When I joined Route, I had never played a Pokemon game that involved breeding (and still haven't), so I had to learn the whole system as I went. Option One offers what is probably the simplest and most straightforward of the breeding systems laid out here: when you breed two Pokemon, the species will be the mother, and they'll have moves from the father. It's fairly cut-and-dry, and any breeder with no idea what they're doing (like I was) can pretty easily open up their roster and know exactly what species they can produce and what they can't at a glance, without any extra hassle of what anomalies might be in which clutch and so on. If there'd been an added percentage chance to factor in while I was learning the ropes, the prospect would've seemed a lot more daunting than it already did.

There's also arguably the question of translating an arbitrary percentage onto a given clutch when that percentage might not divide evenly across the eggs, especially when some characters don't breed often enough for it to really make a difference. Sure, if it's a 25% chance of the father's species and you have a clutch of four eggs, that's simple enough. But the more you play with the numbers, the more complex considerations have to go into producing your final clutch (like rolling an RNG for each and every egg?), and again, for people who have no idea what they're doing and are learning as they go, the less complicated the better.

I also think that Option One neatly avoids the whole question of the honor system and potential abuse of the egg percentages whatsoever, which again keeps things simple and efficient. People who want to be more complex with it still have some strategizing opportunities available to them in terms of egg moves and which fathers to use with which mothers (or when to use a Ditto, and so on), but for the people who need to learn the system for the very first time, it can all be boiled down to the simple formula: "Mother = Species. Father = Egg moves."

And personally, I favor that, because the whole system seemed complicated enough as it was when I was first learning it without any extra considerations to think about, and I feel like the more accessible the breeding system is to the people who have no familiarity with it, the better.